


Letters from Rose

by Luthor



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, Spoilers, Spoilers for S4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 06:44:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15680115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthor/pseuds/Luthor
Summary: Set post-canon Season 4: Rose writes letters to Luisa from prison.





	Letters from Rose

**Author's Note:**

> Something a little different from me, this time, but I've had this idea sitting around for a while and it really took off the other night. 
> 
> I guess I wanted to explore where Luisa and Rose are in canon currently, before the new season comes along and potentially dashes my hopes and dreams. As always, a big thanks to [Ims0s0rry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ims0s0rry) for the proofreading and beta. ^^ 
> 
> *There are spoilers for Season 4 here.*

The first letter arrives on the eve of her mother’s real death.

The timing is so eerily poignant that Luisa wonders if perhaps Rose had done it on purpose, and then decides that she must have. She may not have been _Rose_ when she sat by Luisa’s side and held her hand, and listened to a stranger detail her mother’s final, peaceful years spent at the lake – Luisa may not have wanted her present, at the time, if she _had_ been Rose – but that doesn’t take the knowledge away from her.

When Luisa finds it in among her small stack of post redirected from the Marbella (she rarely gets any, out here, but when it comes it comes like buses – none at all, and then all at once), she feels something cold and thin snatch the breath from her lungs.

Rose’s handwriting is instantly recognisable.

In any other circumstance, the envelope would be fragranced and graffitied with lovehearts. The distinct lack of doodles twists at Luisa’s stomach; she sees her own name written in Rose’s looping scrawl and remembers, suddenly, the list that Rose had provided her with, of names written in that same handwriting, of all the lives that she has stolen.

Overcome with nausea, she puts the letter in a box, and puts the box deep into her closet, where she might just forget that it exists.

She doesn’t.

 

 

Rafael visits again.

He’s exhausted, he says, as they catch up in a small nook of the hotel lobby, where there are bookcases and chaise lounges and charmingly mis-matched cushions that Luisa had hand-picked herself. It’s late and they’re off-peak, and the guest house is quiet. It’s just the two of them and the waxing crescent moon in the window, like a coy smirk looking down at them from above.

 _Look at the two of you now_ , she thinks it’s saying.

“So, this is you, then?” Rafael asks, looking around the lobby.

“For now, yeah,” Luisa agrees. “I’m doing much better out here.”

He looks older, Luisa thinks, than he had when she’d left.

She wants to prod and pry and ask him what is happening, in that life of his, what is going so wrong that it’s given him new wrinkles. Rafael slumps in the chair and stares vacantly ahead for too long, that Luisa presses the questions back down again. He hasn’t come here to talk. In fact, he’s been a lousy conversationalist, but Luisa forgives him.

In the midst of their quiet, she almost asks Rafael about the letter, if anything else has turned up at the Marbella for her that hasn’t found its way here, if _anyone_ has turned up. She doesn’t expect Rose, exactly, but therein lies the problem.

She thinks of the letter hidden away in her closet, and regrets that second mug of hot cocoa that she made them, sitting heavy in her stomach.

She doesn’t much feel like talking, either.

 

 

A second letter arrives exactly two weeks after the first, and the third one two weeks after that.

Luisa hides them away like she had that first letter, in the box beneath her shoe collection, and hopes that that’ll be it – that she’ll let them gather dust there, until the ink fades, and the paper softens, and her stomach no longer twists at the sight of new mail.

The box isn’t allowed to gather dust, however.

The letters arrive on schedule for the rest of the month, and the one after that, as the air grows hot and oppressive with summer, and Luisa comes to expect them. It’s no longer a shock to see Rose’s handwriting, the same as always, sometimes in blue ink, other times in black, never with the loveheart doodles that had covered every other letter or drawing that Rose has given her, over the years.

 

 

It is mid-summer and Luisa almost cries when the aircon breaks, but she hasn’t the moisture to spare.

She sets up three separate fans around the reception desk and does not move from the spot, if she can help it. The visiting guests come to her with raised voices and complaints, and Luisa tells them, repetitively, that there’s a repair technician on the way, and that free bottled water and ice cream is being made available by the lakeside as an apology for the inconvenience.

A lot of pink, sweaty faces come to her desk, that day, and by the time the sun disappears and the air cools down to almost-bearable, Luisa’s temper is high.

She’s late picking up her post, and when she sees the letter from Rose at the top of the pile, her vision turns red.

She takes it up to her room and she rips the door to her closet open, and she throws shoes left and right to get to the box that she buries after every time she uncovers it, like there’s ever anybody here who could find it, like if she puts them out of sight for long enough, they’ll lose the impact that they have on her.

When she pulls off the lid, there are seven already inside, and this new one marks the eighth.

Four months’ worth of Rose’s letters, each one unopened, each one unanswered, each one with a return address on the back like Luisa could forget where she is, like Luisa might change her mind and write her back, one day.

Luisa holds the box in both hands and her grip shakes with fury.

The tears come, then, now that she’s alone.

Frustration and anger and fear and— _disappointment_. Rose may as well have written her name on that list along with the others, she thinks, for all that she’s taken from her. She holds the box in both hands and there’s barely any weight to it at all, really, it’s just paper and ink and the cardboard containing it.

Luisa feels it heavier, like a bottle, like the Patrón that she’d hidden in the back of her closet for six months, one time, much like she has these letters. She had told Rose once that it made her feel better about herself, seeing the alcohol, having it directly within her presence, and not reaching for it, even if she wanted to – and, often, she did.

But, it’s always going to be more than that.

It’s always going to be a remote detonator, and all she has to do is press the big red trigger button to blow her life to smithereens, and she has.

She wants to.

The box of letters has become her failsafe, her just in case, her _if I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go with a bang_.

Holding it, now, Luisa wants nothing more than to set fire to it all.

She contemplates it with a box of matches in one hand – even lights one above her metal trashcan, and holds it until the flame is near-touching her fingers, before she blows it out again. Luisa tosses the matches to the floor and bows her head, and feels more tears come, because she can’t do it, as much as she wants to in this moment.

The box can’t stay here, though.

Any other letters that arrive, Luisa will toss them straight into the trash.

The ones that she has are all that she’s got left of Rose, of what they had together, if they had anything at all. She takes it down to the guest house’s private garden, out near the back where there’s a rosebush struggling in the heat. It’s fitting. It feels right, when she kneels down in the dirt and holds the box in her hands like a coffin, and prepares to lay it all to rest.

Except, the gardener’s tool shed had been locked, and Luisa has only her fingers and her blunt nails to dig into the parched earth with. The soil is cracked and starved, and while it crumbles some, it also bends one of her fingernails right back until she yelps.

Luisa hugs her throbbing finger to her chest, tears in her eyes, but they’re more from frustration than pain.

She thumps a fist into the ground, then again, again, until she’s sobbing with her punches.

When she’s done, and the pain has started to register, Luisa is sweating and shaking and covered in dirt and her own tears. Her fingernails are black, and her body aches from exertion. When she inspects her one sore fingernail, there’s a crease straight through the centre of it that makes her wince.

The box of letters sits discarded by her side, knocked over, its contents spilling out.

Luisa tucks them back in again and puts on the lid.

She takes the box back up to her room, and when the next letter arrives, two weeks later, it joins the other eight in her closet.

 

 

Rafael does not say hello to her, when he next arrives, just checks into his guest room with dead eyes that struggle to meet her own, and disappears.

Luisa almost follows him, but there’s a line after him, and the phone begins to ring. She’s got a job to do, she’s needed here, and she knows and likes her fellow staff members too much to put her job on their collective shoulders, when it’s this busy and she’s slacking off.

When she does get a break, she goes straight to Rafael’s room and knocks before she lets herself in.

She’d thought it strange that he hadn’t had a suitcase with him, but when she spots the empty bottles from the mini fridge scattered over the bed, her blood curdles. There’s no sign of Rafael. Luisa has never been particularly athletic, and she would refer back to what she knows of adrenaline rushes, if asked, but she makes it halfway across the entire guest house’s grounds before somebody hearing her description of Rafael points her in the direction of the boat house.

She is out of breath and panting when she finds him, her arms sore from rowing one of the little four-person dinghies out to the centre of the lake. The only boat out there today that isn’t moving appears empty, until she gets close enough to see the body slouched in the bottom.

Luisa’s dinghy bumps into his, and Rafael groans at the impact.

At once, relief sags into every aching joint.

It’s a perilous climb into his boat, but Luisa makes it with wobbly legs and a hard slap to his shoulder. When Rafael doesn’t so much as move, only groans again and covers his face, Luisa settles down in the bottom of the boat with him.

It’s uncomfortable. It’s wet and it smells like lake water, and the cramped space is not made for two adult bodies to comfortably squeeze into. Luisa ends up half-sitting, her legs crossed at the ankles and resting over Rafael’s.

“What the hell are you doing?” Luisa asks him, when he uncovers his face. “I was _worried_.”

Rafael looks up at the sky – blessedly overcast – and fat tears roll down either side of his temples.

“I wanted to see the magic fish.”

They stay out on the water until the sky is pink and indigo with oncoming twilight, and Rafael begins to speak. Once he starts, much like a dam being burst, it floods out of him like a devastating wave, leaving behind the wreckage that’s become of his life for Luisa to pick her way through like scraps of debris.

He talks about Jane, and Petra, and _Michael_.

Luisa has so many questions to ask, but instead she says, “How are the girls and Mateo? Tell me about them, next.”

She has her head on his shoulder and his arm around her, and the alcohol on his breath is more repulsive than it is coveted. She understands why he had come here, of course she does, and she struggles to stay mad at him. This place had been something of a refuge for her mother, and now for Luisa herself. He’d wanted a piece of that, she understands, but the peace this place could bring him will not solve the external problems that weigh on his everyday life.

When they make it back to the guest house, Luisa calls Jane from his phone.

Jane answers between the second and third ring, and is surprised when Luisa speaks up, instead of Rafael.

“He’s safe,” she tells her, after awkward small talk. “I’ll make sure he gets back home okay, but I don’t know when that will be.”

After a long silence, Jane asks, “Can I talk to him?”

Luisa peeks around the doorframe to where Rafael is passed out on the bed, already in the recovery position and with cushions to keep him that way until he wakes up in the morning. Luisa slips back into the bathroom, leaving him undisturbed.

“He’s pretty out of it right now,” she tells Jane, and can hear the disappointment in the _oh, okay_ that she gets in response. “But, I’ll let him know that you want to talk to him. I think he’d like that, from what he’s said.”

There is an awkward pause in which Luisa doesn’t know whether or not to ask after Jane, with all that she’s going through.

As though sensing this, Jane thanks her for calling and terminates the line.

Luisa slips Rafael’s phone onto the nightstand along with a glass of fresh water. It’ll be stale, come morning, but her brother won’t be in any position to turn it down. She leaves him to sleep in his shirt and slacks, though does remove the shoes.

“Sleep this off,” she tells him, pressing a kiss to his warm forehead, “and fix this in the morning.”

 

 

Months pass.

Rafael stays in contact, when he can. She calls him to ask over the kids, and the Marbella, and how all of their mutual friends are, although neither of them have been very good at staying in touch, lately. And, Rafael calls her, and he updates her on the situation at home, and she listens.

She has spent long enough in therapy to know the role that she’s meant to play, here, of the non-judgemental observer who hears his problems and then puts them into clearer perspective. That’s not who she is, though. She will never be an objective witness, and she tells Rafael as much, then recommends him an actual therapist.

Rafael is reluctant to take the details down, but that he takes them at all gives her hope.

 

 

The letters continue to arrive.

Summer cools to autumn, although the change is less dramatic here, where she still has to apply bountiful sunscreen and would spend half her day in sunglasses, if guests hadn’t already complained about her doing just as much before.

Luisa starts to leave the box of letters out from beneath the pile of her shoes, on a shelf just high enough that she doesn’t have to see it, if she doesn’t want to. She collects the letters with the same manner as a farmer collecting a harvest that is always expected to be there.

 

 

Her time at the guest house goes quickly.

She has made friends, and the flicker of what could be something more, but Luisa is open and honest in how she rejects romantic advances, these days. She isn’t ready for it. She doesn’t want it. She has to focus on herself.

Three days before Thanksgiving, she receives a call from Rafael.

“When are you due home?” he asks, blasé, like he hasn’t considered the idea that she won’t be.

“It’s not really been home to me for a while, has it?” She hears the sound of him stop walking over the phone, and then a door closing. “Won’t you be with your family, anyway?”

“Well, yeah,” Rafael says, and there is an awkward pause in which he does not invite her to join. Luisa smiles sadly in the quietness of it. “But, it’s Thanksgiving. We could do something in the night, once we’ve eaten. It feels wrong not to see you.”

“Kind of,” Luisa says, in a way that means, _not really_. “But, it’s been like that for a while, hasn’t it?”

Rafael is quiet on the other end of the line.

“You’ll be with your family, you won’t miss me.”

“You’re still my family, Luisa.”

“It just doesn’t always feel like that. Not like it used to. And, I get that. I don’t like it, but being here has helped me to accept it. There’s just too much that has happened, isn’t there? There’s just too much hurt and too much trust lost, but you’re still my brother. I love you, but we’re not there yet. Maybe we never will be.”

The sound of an office phone ringing curls into the line, like a needle of sound in Luisa’s ear, and she winces. Rafael mutters something before telling her, “I have to take this. We’ll talk about this properly though, alright?”

“Enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner,” Luisa tells him, and the topic never does arise again.

 

 

Winter in Florida isn’t exactly snow angels and woolly hats.

It’s still cool enough for a jacket, though, as Luisa takes a stroll around the lakeside after dinner. There are people out on the lake, still, in little dinghies and kayaks. Less people are walking the perimeter of the lake, although she does pass a few – guests and staff alike – and while they exchange greetings, they seem to sense that she is not out here for the company, and carry on without her.

By the time she returns, it’s late and she’s ready for bed.

She almost makes the stairs before remembering what day it is, and she detours down to the office behind the hotel lobby, where all of their post is kept in labelled pigeon holes. Luisa pulls hers out with a yawn and is halfway up the stairs, sorting through it, when she realises that she’s missed one.

She could leave it until the morning.

The letter isn’t going anywhere, and it’s not like she’s in any rush to read it. Still, it feels wrong to leave a piece of Rose down there alone.

Luisa backtracks to the pigeon holes, although when she looks into her own she realises that there’s nothing left in there waiting. She begins the arduous task of checking every other hole with post still inside of it, and as she shoves the last lot back, becomes anxious that maybe somebody has already taken Rose’s letter by mistake.

She will ask around in the morning, just to be sure, but the thought is worrying.

There’s nobody here who particularly hates her enough to steal and read her mail, but paranoia comes quick and relentless, when it comes at all, and Luisa has a fitful night’s sleep with it. In the morning, she hounds her colleagues for a clue, but none that she speaks to claim to know anything about the missing letter.

By lunch time, Luisa calls Rafael and stays on the phone with him until he personally checks that there’s no outstanding mail at the Marbella for her, that may just not have been sent on, they might have for whatever reason been missed from her redirected post. She calls the post office, next, but she has no tracking number, and a short temper, and gives up after speaking to an unhelpful manager.

Letters get lost in the mail all the time, though, and so Luisa puts it out of her mind and carries on with her life.

 

 

 

Until, two weeks later, she collects her post and sees again that there’s no letter from Rose.

Luisa takes her post to her room and casts it aside, not even bothered to open it. She finds the box on the shelf in her closet and sits cross-legged on her bed with its contents spilled out before her. Thirteen letters stare up at her, some with dirt on the front, others without. Some in blue ink, others written in black.

Luisa looks at them and thinks, it’s finally happened. Rose has stopped writing to her. She has spent half of a year sending these to her, and has finally accepted that Luisa will not write her back, that Luisa has given up on her, already.

She isn’t sure how she feels about that.

Panic, mainly, and then dread, and then peace, and then guilt, and then—

 _Longing_.

Longing as sharp as biting into an ice cube, piercing the nerve.

Longing until she’s so sick to the stomach that she might actually vomit.

Longing that sweeps her up like a tidal wave, that destroys the ramshackle barriers that she has built with wood and nails, and spit and glue, around her heart. That wears down the bad memories, the hurt and all the pain, that she has gradually acquired, like a tree grows rings inside its stump for every year of its existence. Longing strong enough to make her forget, momentarily, how bad it had been when they had been at their worst.

She has lost her, Luisa thinks, and as she thinks it she knows that it is the truth.

It’s over.

Once upon a time, she had expected great peace to come with that thought, and she had expected great sorrow.

Now, Luisa sits cross legged with all that she has left of Rose, and it is not much at all, and she isn’t sure what she feels at all, if anything.

She picks a handful of the letters up, as many as she can fit between her fingers and her thumb, and sifts through them by date. They are unorganised and out of order, as she tosses them back to the bed. She discards them like the petals of a white rose; _she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me_ —

Finally, she finds the first.

It opens easily.

The paper is thin and the envelope is faintly smudged with dirt and her own sweat, from the time she’d tried to bury them. Luisa unfolds it with steady fingers – a doctor’s fingers – and feels at peace with the quiet that comes after the sunset, when the moon is full and bright in her window.

 _Dearest Luisa,_ the letter begins, and she settles in for the night.

 

 

Luisa stops reading and re-reading the letters at 5:03am.

The little clock in the corner of her phone is blurred when she sees it, and it takes some blinking and restoring the moisture to her eyes for her to be able to see clearly again. The letters have been made into an organised pile in front of her, with the very first at the top and the very last that Rose sent her down at the bottom.

The envelopes have been slipped into a plastic wallet and returned to her box, because it feels right, now, that she keeps them. She will do the same with the letters, probably, once she has finished scrutinising them.

While she stretches and cracks her joints, Luisa ruminates over what she has read.

Her gaze is brought back down to the first letter, facing her, and the looping scrawl that tells the story of Rose’s second month in prison, and the work that she’s been doing there.

Luisa reads, again, about the counselling sessions that Rose had doubted would be of any benefit, and of the counsellor that Rose had described none-too-politely as a withered middle-aged woman who probably hadn’t moisturised her wrinkled face in all her fifty-something years.

By the fourth letter, Rose admits that it could be useful if used for sorting through her thoughts, for ordering her restless mind. By the seventh letter, she writes that she recognises what she’s doing, now, in writing to Luisa, and that she wishes there was a better way for her to make her amends.

In the thirteenth letter, that Luisa has read and re-read the most, it being the most recent depiction of Rose’s mental state and thoughts, Rose seems at peace with her new routine. There is no bitterness or resentment, like in some previous letters, towards Luisa herself or her family. There is a brief description of the novel that Rose has started reading, and what she ate for lunch.

And, on the back, there’s a crude doodle of her counsellor.

That’s all there is left of Rose in Luisa’s life.

The last time that they had spent this much time apart, Rose had created an entirely new identity, perhaps more than one. Luisa wonders if she is doing the same, now, or if it’s already happened, or if there never was more than one identity to begin with, just different faces of the same dice and she got the luck of the roll.

Luisa doubts she’ll ever know for sure.

She puts the letters back in the box, and puts the box on the floor to deal with later.

When she goes to bed, finally, she sleeps uninterrupted until her alarm goes off just a few hours later, and would call in sick, if she didn’t live here.

 

 

Luisa wakes up alone on Christmas morning so early that it’s still dark out.

When they were kids, she was always the first awake, scuttling into Rafael’s bed to shake him from sleep. The nannies were well prepared with morning cocoa and breakfast, and a limit of two presents to open each, until their father woke to say good morning and take them into the sitting room with the big tree and all the presents beneath it.

He rarely stayed long enough to see the last one unwrapped.

This morning, Luisa’s body wakes like muscle memory, and the giddiness is just a hangover of nostalgia at the back of her head. Still, she rolls over to find her phone, and texts Rafael an enthusiastic Merry Christmas. His reply comes barely a minute later, and so Luisa rings him.

“ _Merry Christmas,_ ” he says to her, again, whispering, and Luisa says it back.

“Are you alone?” she asks.

“Jane’s sleeping upstairs,” he answers, voice thick with sleep, still. “I forgot to eat the cookies Mateo left out last night.”

“Sounds like a balanced breakfast.”

“It’s tradition,” Rafael says, and Luisa can tell that he’s smiling.

She imagines he’ll be making new traditions, this time around, and the thought sobers her some.

While Rafael clears away the previous night’s offerings, Luisa tells him how she’ll be spending her Christmas. They have a dinner being held here, of course, and all of the staff are welcome to join. Luisa… doesn’t think it’ll be as sad as it sounds, really. She’s come to appreciate the friends that she’s made here.

“I want lots of pictures,” she tells Rafael. “Of every present, okay? And, when you’re back at the Marbella with the twins—”

“I promise,” he laughs, but it’s too loud and quickly cut short. “Oh, Lu, I think they’re awake. I’d better go. I’ll call you later, okay? Enjoy your dinner, and I hope you like your present. It took me a little while to put it together, but… Well, I think you’ll like it.”

She hears voices on the other end of the line, Jane’s and Mateo’s, asking him who he’s speaking to this early in the morning.

“Go,” Luisa tells him, “be with your family.”

So, he does.

It’s still early enough that she could go back to bed, but Luisa knows that she won’t sleep. Instead, she gets out of bed and wraps a robe around herself, and finds the little manila envelope that Rafael had sternly instructed her not to open until this morning.

She tears into it with effort, and slips out a tiny wrapped rectangle. When Luisa pulls the square of wrapping paper away from it, it’s to reveal a USB stick.

She’s about to shoot Rafael a quick (mainly joking) text about how he’s always been terrible at buying her presents, when her aging laptop opens the new storage device. Inside the flash drive are three separate folders, each ominously titled, _Past, Present_ , and, _Future_.

Luisa opens the _Past_ folder first and laughs out loud at the sight of her and Rafael’s childhood photographs, digitally remastered, all the way up to Rafael’s gangly teens. The photographs begin with Luisa’s birth, a grainy sepia-tint picture of her exhausted, smiling mother and the sleeping infant on her chest. Rafael’s arrival is marked with a picture of Luisa bent over _his_ mother, kissing the crown of his head.

 _God, but she’d loved him_.

She entertains herself flicking through them at random, but her intrigue keeps her from lingering too long.

In the _Present_ folder, Luisa is greeted with pictures of her nieces and nephew, some that she has seen before and others that she has never. The latest photograph is recent, taken in matching Christmas sweaters. There’s a sizeable gap in Anna’s smile, where her first baby tooth has fallen out.

Luisa spends longer, here, looking at the pictures, marvelling at how much they’ve grown since she had last been sent pictures of them like this – and always only pictures.

Before she even reaches the _Future_ folder, she is teary-eyed.

When she double-clicks into it, however, there isn’t a reel of pictures for her to flick through, just a single solitary video. Luisa opens it and it takes her laptop several seconds to properly load. When it does, the sound is too quiet, and she has to turn it up and restart it from the beginning.

The video must have been taken just before the USB stick was mailed out to her.

Luisa recognises the Marbella’s blue walls in an instant, and the suite that the camera swings wildly around, until it settles on a kitchen table. The entire top of it is covered with a table cloth while a gingerbread house is being messily constructed at the centre.

From behind the camera, Rafael’s voice shouts for his three children to say hello.

They cheerfully wave back, but are engrossed in their task.

“Do you know who this video is for?” Rafael asks, leaning down by Ellie’s side as she decorates a roof panel.

“Yes, it’s for Tia Luisa,” she says matter-of-factly, not stopping her task.

“And is there anything you want to say to Tia Luisa?”

Ellie makes a distracted humming noise, until she puts the roof panel down and looks up into the camera lens. “I would say,” she begins, and laughs, embarrassed. She tries to cover her face but Rafael tickles her until she stops. “I would say, Merry Christmas, Tia Luisa!”

“And, what else?”

“And, I hope you get lots of cool presents.”

“And?” Rafael presses.

“ _And_ , I love you.”

“You do?”

“Yes!” Ellie scoffs, losing interest in the interrogation. “She’s my _Tia_.”

“I love Tia Luisa, too,” Anna pipes up, leaning over the table to get the camera’s attention. “Daddy, can you help me do this? It’s sticky.”

“I want the camera, please,” Mateo says, and the screen shakes violently as its passed to him.

For a moment, the picture is sideways and then upside down, until somebody out of screen corrects it.

“I can do it,” Mateo insists, the camera shaking again, until it settles back on the table. “This is what we’re doing,” he says, showing Luisa the gingerbread wall that he’s decorating. “This is their house where all the gingerbread people live. We made them first but we can’t put them in it because I already ate mine, and then mommy said it was only fair that Ellie and Anna eat theirs, too.”

“Girls, how did you get icing up _here_?” Luisa hears from Petra, and the camera swings perilously up to see her, however briefly.

When the picture lurches again, its as Mateo turns the camera on himself. The angle is wrong and partially cuts off half of his face, at times, but his hold is surprisingly steady when he’s settled.

“This is our Christmas present to you, Tia Luisa, because daddy said we couldn’t buy you a puppy.”

“ _And, we can’t_ ,” Rafael insists, off camera.

Mateo looks unconvinced.

“But, daddy, it’s _Christmas_. She should get to have a puppy on Christmas.”

“Dogs are for more than just Christmas, Mateo,” Jane says, with the patience of a kindergarten teacher. “They’re a lot of work, a lot of responsibility.”

“I know that,” Mateo insists, “but, you said she’s on her own for Christmas. No one should be on their own for Christmas.”

Luisa pauses the video.

Her throat feels tight and her eyes are rimmed with water; all it would take is one small blink and she will lose it all. She takes deep breaths. She looks at her nephew’s cherubic face and can’t fathom how much she loves him, how much she loves all of them, when she’s never been allowed to properly meet them, yet.

She starts the video again when she’s feeling more composed.

“I know,” Rafael is saying, closer to the camera, now. “She won’t be _alone_ , alone, though. She’ll have lots of friends around her, and this video, remember?” Mateo still looks unconvinced. “But, how would you feel if we invited Tia Luisa over here to spend New Year’s with us?”

On camera, Mateo’s face lights up. Luisa stares at the screen wide-eyed and suddenly breathless.

“Yes!” he shouts, and the camera shakes again. “Yes, Tia Luisa, you _have_ to come here for the fireworks!”

Anna’s face appears over his shoulder, agreeing, “ _You have to come here for the fireworks!_ ”

“Mateo,” Ellie says, “can you help me with this bit?”

The camera is taken from Mateo from behind, and lingers briefly on the table as they go back to building the gingerbread house. After the quiet interval in which the house is successfully constructed, the camera is turned around again, this time to face Rafael as he walks through the suite to somewhere a little more private.

“I’m sorry that it’s short notice,” he says, and looks anything but. He comes from a world where he can drop and change his working schedule at a whim, and so does she. “But, they’re excited about it, now, so you can’t disappoint them.”

“Dick,” Luisa whispers to the screen, her voice thick with tears, but she’s smiling.

 

 

She meets her _niblings_ for the first time amid fireworks and party poppers.

The girls are shy and inquisitive, quizzing her on where she’s been and what she does and what she thinks about the fireworks, and sea turtles, and cartoon characters that she’s never heard of before. Mateo does not share their reserve. Within the first ten minutes of meeting her, he declares Luisa his favourite tia and insists she carry him on her back for the remainder of the night.

Luisa agrees wholeheartedly, tears in her eyes.

 

 

Springtime at the lakeside is Luisa’s favourite.

The water is crisp and clear, and warm enough to swim in, when she feels like it. Mainly, she keeps to her walks around the perimeter, where the wildflowers are thriving from the wet season, in pinks and whites and yellows and reds. She has a vase of them back in her room, placed in the sunshine, brightening up the space.

It is early, still, and Luisa has the day to herself with no plans and no expectations.

She walks until her legs tire, and then she returns to the guest house. She is making her way back to her room to change (she thinks a swim would be nice, actually, before the water’s too crowded), when she’s stopped by one of the kitchen staff.

“This was in my pigeon hole by mistake,” he tells her, handing the letter over.

Luisa’s stomach flutters strangely when she sees it.

She has not received a letter like this in months. She had given up any hope of there being more, and she was coming to terms with that – thought she had already come to terms with that – but the feeling she gets when she sees her own name written in Rose’s handwriting again, makes her doubt that she had even come close to putting her to rest.

The kitchen staff member is watching her nervously, but she dismisses him when he apologises, and her smile is almost convincing.

She takes the letter back to her room, holds it pressed against her chest until she’s through the door and it has closed behind her. The box of Rose’s letters is still at the top of her closet, tucked away at the back of a shelf, gathering dust for real this time.

She does not disturb it.

Instead, she sits on the bed and tears into the letter and reads.

It’s dated three days ago.

 _Luisa_ , it begins.

_I don’t know if you’ve been receiving or reading my letters. I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t. Probably, I should take your silence as confirmation that you aren’t, that they are unwanted, that you don’t want to hear from me again. This will be the last one, then, and I promise that I’ll stop reaching out to you. You’ve made your decision, I think. I have to accept that. But I had to write you one last time, because if there is even a chance that you are reading these, I have to use it to say goodbye._

_I’m getting out, Luisa, and I want to see you before I disappear._

The letter does not detail Rose’s escape plan, but there is an address and a date and a time, and the name of a private dock where Rose will be waiting, if Luisa decides to turn up. That she’s considering it at all is ludicrous. She can’t go. She doesn’t think that she wants to. She doesn’t think, really, that Rose will wait around long enough for her to show.

The date in the letter is a week away, yet, giving Luisa plenty of time to alert the prison. She could put an end to it all, could have them tighten up security so that Rose never gets the chance to escape again, could implicate her lawyer or whoever else smuggled this letter out for her, to stop the prison staff from checking it before it went.

She considers it, and it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth.

Oh, Rose deserves to be where she is, there is no doubt, but Luisa hates to think of her locked up like she is.

She folds the letter away and puts it with the others, disturbing the box for the last time.

She puts it out of her mind.

 

 

Except, she doesn’t.

Can’t.

“You’re zoning out again,” Rafael tells her, and Luisa blinks up at him.

She is cross-legged in the middle of the twins’ nursery, surrounded by toys, many of which she has bought them herself. The kids are on the other side of the room, having moved on to the twins’ paint set. They’re in matching aprons and don’t seem to notice that Luisa hasn’t moved for however long.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Luisa says, automatic. “Yeah, it’s fine. Help me up?”

She groans with the effort of standing; Mateo had dragged her by the hand up and down the Children’s Only play structure until she was exhausted, and her body is feeling its age right now. She loves it. Rafael laughs at her and Luisa bumps his shoulder with her own as she passes.

“Do you want a drink of anything?”

“I’ll make it,” Luisa tells him, and urges Rafael towards the paint table when Anna calls out for assistance.

Before long, all three kids and Rafael himself are finger-painting a mess onto a giant piece of paper. Luisa sits alone on a couch, a glass of water in her lap, and watches them. She can’t help but smile at the fun that they’re having, but she observes it from a distance, from her place outside of their bubble, and that’s okay.

She is thankful that Rafael put aside old grudges and allowed her this, she is, but she can’t help but feel like he went out and made his own family without her, and she has yet to do the same.

It’s not jealousy, exactly. It’s not even resentment.

She’s happy for him, of course she is.

She wishes, though, that she could have something like this for herself.

“Tia Luisa, come and play with us,” Ellie demands, and Luisa hops off the couch to join in.

“What kind of mess are we making here, hm?”

“A big one!” Mateo cheers.

 

Afterwards, when the toys have been cleared and the children put to bed, Rafael finds her in the bathroom scrubbing paint from her hands. It’s all over her clothes, as well, spattered and dotted and dipped, not that she cares.

“I’m thinking of taking some time away,” she tells him, rinsing soap suds from up her arms. “Something last minute.”

Rafael leans in the doorway and asks, “Anywhere nice?”

Luisa shuts the water off and grabs for a towel to dry her hands. She uses a sizeable amount of Petra’s expensive hand lotion, rubbing it into her skin up to the elbow and then dipping her head to her wrist; it smells like coconut and almonds.

“I don’t know, yet. I’ve just been feeling like I need to take a break, you know?”

“Sure,” Rafael agrees, and that’s that.

No accusation, no suspicion.

 _God, how we’ve grown_ , she thinks, and it sits like a pebble of guilt in the bottom of her stomach.

Easily ignored.

 

 

 

It takes her several tries to find the dock.

She is at least an hour late for Rose’s designated time, and Luisa knows what that woman is like for keeping a schedule. She’s already gone. Luisa thinks she’s okay with that. She has changed her mind about what she’s doing here three times alone since stepping out of the cab that had brought her, and thinks maybe it’s best that the decision be taken out of her hands, this time, because she knows what will happen if she sees Rose.

But, then she sees Rose.

She has her back to Luisa at the end of a pier, staring out at the sea. Luisa knows its her. Something about the posture, the length of her legs in those jeans, her _hair_. She’s barely a few meters away when Rose turns around and confirms it.

She looks at Luisa like she’s seeing her for the first time— for the last time, perhaps.

Her gaze travels the full length of her and Luisa watches her take a breath in, and in, and in, like she’s gasping. It sinks back out of her and Rose’s shoulders slump with it. She looks exhausted, now that Luisa is close enough to properly see her. Her escape had not been easy.

“You came.” Rose says it like she can’t believe it. “You’re _late_.”

“I got lost,” Luisa deadpans, and it brings a smile to Rose’s face, one of those tender, private ones that Luisa has only ever seen directed her way. When she finally stops in front of her, Luisa clasps her hands nervously together. She hadn’t planned this far ahead, and just seeing Rose makes her breathless.

She does not overthink it.

She stares Rose down and she reaches out with one arm, and before she can initiate it any further, Rose sweeps her into a hug. It is crushing. Luisa wraps both arms around her middle and feels Rose do the same. When she buries her face in Rose’s neck, Rose sinks fingers into her hair and holds her there, so gently.

Luisa loses track of time. She could lose days, like this, and wouldn’t care.

She turns her face away from the tickling hairs against her cheeks and feels Rose’s heartbeat quick and fierce against her ear. The new position reveals another clue to how arduous Rose’s escape plot must have been, however, and Luisa wrinkles her nose at the subtle scent of sweat and garbage.

“You stink,” she whispers.

“I know.”

Rose tightens her hold on her, suddenly, and Luisa feels her kiss the very top of her head. It’s like something soft and warm has been pressed into the skin there, a tenderness that spreads down the back of her neck, her chest, right to the tips of her toes, like she’s enveloped in the feeling of nothing being able to go wrong ever again, just as long as she stays right where she is.

But, then Rose is retreating.

“You didn’t bring a bag,” she says, and Luisa does not shy away from her searching gaze when she draws away.

She shivers in the windchill.

“Are you mad at me?”

Rose’s expression falters. She frowns and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Why would I be?”

“It’s my fault that you were caught. I told the police everything.”

“Lu,” Rose says, and Luisa feels like she’s maybe the most precious thing that’s ever existed, in this moment, “I could never be mad at you for that. How could I be angry with you for seeing the best parts of people – for seeing the good in them and choosing to believe in it? You’d have never fallen in love with me, if you didn’t.”

Luisa swallows, her throat uncomfortably tight.

“Where will you go now?”

“I don’t know. There aren’t many places that someone like me can become invisible in, but there are places.”

She does not tell Luisa where, exactly— does not give her a hint.

Luisa thinks, she does not give her the opportunity to give her up, again. Or, maybe, she just hasn’t decided, yet.

“How will you live?”

“As peacefully as I can,” Rose tells her, and Luisa isn’t sure if she’s being purposefully dismissive. “That’s all I want, now. I’ve had enough of the drugs and the criminals and the violence. I just want something simple, this time, something lowkey.”

“What about the money?”

Rose’s smile turns coy. “A girl’s gotta have a backup plan.”

“Yeah, well you were always better at this stuff than me,” Luisa says, scuffing a shoe.

Rose smirks and nods her agreement, but she soon sobers.

“It won’t be like that, this time, not if I can help it.”

Luisa looks up at her, half-squinting in the beam of a streetlamp. “It will always be like that,” she says, and it’s true.

“I guess that means you won’t be coming with me.” Even as Rose says it, she’s smiling.

It’s an awful smile that Luisa hates the sight of. It digs at her every nerve like an ice pick, sharp and cold. Luisa would not describe Rose as delicate—as _fragile_. She isn’t. She’s the strongest woman Luisa has ever known, and she hasn’t always meant that admirably.

That smile says something otherwise.

“It wouldn’t last,” Luisa says. “It wouldn’t be real, it wouldn’t— it would never be safe.”

“Yeah,” Rose agrees. There might be tears in her eyes, or it might just be what Luisa wants to see. She sniffs and wets her lips and studies Luisa like they’ve reached that dreaded, penultimate moment before her departure. “You better say goodbye and kiss me before I change my mind about going, too.”

So, Luisa kisses her, until they’re breathless, until there are tears on both their cheeks.

“Rose,” she says, drawing back, and she is an idiot. Maybe they both are. Maybe that’s why they work so well together, when they’re working together at all. “Of course, I’m going with you.”

Rose stares at her, agape. “But—”

“Can I tell you something?” Luisa asks, and Rose nods, absurdly, like she could ever stop her from speaking her mind. “I was with Rafael last week. He was sitting around this tiny ladybird table finger-painting with his kids, making a _mess_ ,” she laughs, breathy, “and they were just having the best time together. They weren’t even doing anything special, this is like a normal occurrence for them all, but they were just so happy and in tune with one another. They really just get each other, you know? Those kids, and Raf—you can see it, you can just tell from looking at them.”

She looks at Rose and her smile wanes.

“It made me think, when did I last have that? Who _gets me_ like that? Who sees me at my messiest, at my absolute lowest, and isn’t just fucking repulsed by it?”

“You would find that again,” Rose whispers, like her words are betraying her, like a part of her is terrified to admit it. “You’d just have to put yourself out there. Everyone who meets you can see how special you are. You’re so easy to love, Luisa, _anyone_ would be privileged to have you in their lives like that.”

“But, I don’t want _anyone_.”

Luisa’s throat is tight. She swallows to clear it, and the wind brushes over her partially exposed shoulders, drags the hem of her dress away from her, like a game. She wraps her arms around herself and represses a shiver.

“You’re the only person who sees me like that,” she whispers, and Rose blinks the moisture back from her eyes.

“Then everyone else in your life is a fucking moron.”

And, then she kisses her.

She kisses the cold right out of her.

 

 

 

Luisa wakes around mid-morning and stretches her naked body through the rumpled sheets.

She is face-first in a pillow that smells like perfume and face cream, and it’s enough to make her smile, until she feels the tickle of a sheet of paper against her cheek. Before she can question it, Luisa recognises the note and the looping handwriting that has been lazily scrawled across it.

_Gone to get milk. R x_

It’s covered in doodled lovehearts.

 


End file.
